Once Upon A Time In Mexico

Robert Rodriguez’s Mexico trilogy comes to a close with this disastrously underwhelming installment that follows Antonio Banderas’ title character as he becomes embroiled in a scheme to overthrow a local government, with the picture containing a whole mess of subplots and characters that cumulatively prevent the viewer from embracing any of this. It’s clear immediately that writer/director Rodriguez isn’t looking to deliver a straight-forward, pared-down narrative in the vein of both El Mariachi and Desperado, as Once Upon A Time In Mexico kicks off with an arms-length stretch that’s far too convoluted and confusing to make anything resembling a positive impact – with the picture, past that point, progressing into a comparably baffling midsection that essentially jettisons Banderas’ protagonist in favor of an increasingly tedious emphasis on supposed periphery figures (including Johnny Depp’s eye-rollingly oddball, wacky-T-shirt wearing CIA agent). There is, as such, little doubt that Once Upon A Time In Mexico, which feels absolutely endless, is hardly able to make the visceral, engrossing impact that Rodriguez has obviously intended, with the aggressively uninvolving atmosphere compounded by Rodriguez’s reliance on chintzy, bottom-of-the-barrel cinematography. (The movie ultimately looks and feels cheaper than its shoestring 1992 predecessor.) The final result is as anticlimactic a finish to a trilogy as one can easily recall, and it’s impossible, in the end, not to wonder just what Rodriguez was thinking when he assembled this astonishing mess of a motion picture.

* out of ****